Unknown soldier

Alex Rodriguez says you'd like him, if you knew who he was

by Yvonne Abraham

"If you really want to get the lowdown, go to a black barber shop."

It is a warm Thursday afternoon, and Alex Rodriguez, 57, candidate for the Eighth Congressional District, is hitting as many barber shops as he can find (and every store in between). They're all in his old South End neighborhood -- where he lived for 30 years, where he made his reputation as a civil rights and housing activist, and where he now rents space in a big house on Rutland Square, the same street where he brought up his three children.

He steps into an old barber shop on Tremont Street, where he used to get his own hair cut, back in the day. But he hasn't been groomed here recently. Nor has anyone else, by the looks of the place. A thick layer of dust covers everything, from the huge, long-dormant fan in the corner to the makeshift, mismatched curtains that close off the back of the store. Stuffing bursts from the three swivel chairs lined before the mirrors, despite reams of gaffer's tape meant to keep it in. This is the Miss Havisham's parlor of barber shops.

Rodriguez's challenge in these waning weeks of the campaign (the primary is September 15) is to prevent his candidacy from being seen as stuck in another decade, too. Despite his last-place showing in several published polls, he has solid credibility with store owners in Lower Roxbury. They remember him from neighborhood meetings and civil rights marches; from his time as an organizer at the United South End Settlements community centers; from his 11 years on the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD); from his 20 years on the Ward 4 Democratic Committee.

But he is still pretty much an unknown in the rest of the district, despite his provocative attempts to elicit public acknowledgment of his candidacy. These efforts have included some direct jabs at the other candidates, as well as a press conference to take the media to task for not covering the minority candidates (Rodriguez is Puerto Rican). Like former mayor Ray Flynn, Rodriguez is defined by his history. But that history looms nowhere near as large as the current front-runner's. It's not sufficiently well known to mitigate a four-year absence from the local political scene (while Flynn was in the Vatican, Rodriguez was in Washington as deputy assistant secretary of the treasury).

Still, it's the engine that drives his campaign: if this day of barber-shop visits and neighborhood nostalgia is any indication, Rodriguez's candidacy for the Eighth is much more about how well his past qualifies him for Congress than about what he'll do once he gets there.

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Rodriguez proudly presents every potential voter he meets with a grainy copy of a photograph from 1965. In it, Dr. Martin Luther King is surrounded by folks taking part in the Great March on Boston Common, which began a block or two from here. To the left of the frame is a young Rodriguez, in skinny tie and toggle coat, working security for the civil rights leader.

"Am I as good-looking as I used to be?" he asks the barber.

"You got ugly," the barber says. Rodriguez goes to put him in a headlock, and they both laugh for a while.

"Oh, but doesn't he look congressional?" asks a Rodriguez worker. Rodriguez stands up straight and smooths down his dark pinstriped suit.

"I try to look good. I try," he says. This is true: minutes before, the candidate had downed a French Vanilla Slim-Fast instead of lunch. He dresses fastidiously. He makes liberal use of Chap Stick. And he avoids the sun.

"You look like a Ted Kennedy," says the barber, relenting, and Rodriguez seems happy enough with that. He heads back out into the neighborhood, shaking hands and handing out those photographs. "There's so much history here," Rodriguez says of the Lower Roxbury neighborhood. "My four years away disconnected me a bit." Just like Flynn, he says. "But," he adds hopefully, "I think I got that back."

In an August 14 Boston Herald/WBZ poll, though, 45 percent of respondents said they didn't recognize Rodriguez's name (which he happens to share with the very famous Seattle Mariners shortstop). Rodriguez came in last in that poll, with 1 percent of the 402 people surveyed saying they'd vote for him. Not surprisingly, the candidate takes issue with the survey sample, maintaining that it was selected based on the low-turnout election of 1996 rather than from among the voters he expects to show up at the polls this time.

Rodriguez allows that he doesn't do well in the crowded candidates' forums alongside the other nine Democratic contenders. "The forums don't work for me because I need three minutes more to say where I come from," he says. He tries to cram it all in anyway, talking fast in that sandpaper voice, telling of his growing up, the 12th of 13 children, in a family struggling in the wake of his father's murder.

Rodriguez has staked out territory to the left of most other Democratic contenders for Joe Kennedy's seat. He has called for a $300,000 campaign-spending cap. He talks about the lunacy of military budgets, and of the need to cut them to fund other programs: fixing inequities in public housing and education, increasing Section 8 rental assistance, widening access to Head Start, training poor mothers in child-rearing. And he pushes his experience in the Treasury Department as proof that he can operate at the federal level.

On July 28, Rodriguez held a press conference to take the major local media to task for their negligible coverage of him and city councilor Charles Yancey, the only minority candidates in the race (Yancey is black). Recently, he has become even more combative, striking out at other candidates when he can. "I don't talk about building a library when I mean a bookshelf with 300 books," he said in a jab at John O'Connor at a recent press conference, before taking shots at Chris Gabrieli and Tom Keane.

Confrontation is nothing new for Rodriguez. When he was with the MCAD, he and then-mayor Flynn clashed a few times, mostly because Rodriguez could be an outspoken critic of the city's record on discrimination issues. When controversy erupted in the late '80s over the fact that several housing projects were failing to integrate, Rodriguez requested that state grants for the Boston Housing Authority be suspended. That did not win him many fans in City Hall.

He left the MCAD in 1991 for the Cambridge Licensing Commission. At the same time, he announced his wish to run for statewide office within three years, a plan that was preempted by Rodriguez's bid to become head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission instead. But that ambition in turn was scuttled, probably by a sexual harassment charge brought against Rodriguez by a clerk at the licensing commission just as he was poised to move to the federal level. The case was dismissed, but Rodriguez did allow that his comments -- about a relative's menstruation and a paralyzed friend's relief to discover sensation in his scrotum -- might have been ill-advised.

Rodriguez says the whole experience affirmed his faith in the process. Even though the harassment claim has dogged him since, "it was clearly a vindication for me," he says. "The system works, because I know in my soul that nothing ever happened in that charge."

That's certainly looking on the bright side. Rodriguez got to Washington anyway, albeit in another job. As a Treasury official, his campaign literature says, Rodriguez "helped President Clinton turn the American economy around." His impact on the economy was not as direct as that language makes it seem: he says he hardly ever met with Clinton, but that "dealing with the
day-to-day administration of the Treasury, you're part of the White House complex, and you execute a lot of the [policy]."

That background, says Rodriguez, is one of his main qualifications for Congress, and his supporters cite it over and over. Indeed, he's hanging his candidacy on it, and on the rest of his extensive résumé, more than on his plans for the future -- much as Flynn has been doing. Rodriguez is calling in chits from years of advocacy in the neighborhood.

But rightly or wrongly (well, wrongly, actually), Flynn's legacy is powerful enough to push him into the seat. Rodriguez's, on the other hand, barely registers outside the local community he has served -- and that has served him -- so well for decades.

But if Rodriguez doesn't win, he says, "I'll just go on and do something else. I've been doing something else my whole life, as my résumé shows."

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham@phx.com.